Apple's iPhone redefines the cell phone the way the iPod redefined music delivery. It combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, Google maps, iTunes and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces a new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software. The 4GB iPhone will go out the door in the US as a Cingular exclusive for $499 on a two-year contract, 8GB for $599: shipping stateside in June, Europe in fourth quarter, Asia in 2008. Keep in mind that 1st generation Apple products will be buggy. The iPone is what Apple does best: a gorgeously designed fashion accessory. Posted by Casey Kazan.

Our planet has gone through several mass extinction episodes in our 4.5 billion year history: the most recent being the Cretaceous 65 million years ago, which wiped out 70 to 75 percent of the species including the dinosaurs. But the real whopper of mass extinctions was the Permian, about 245 million years ago that wiped out at least 95 percent of the species known from fossil records.

According to a research published in the journal Nature, the mass extinction of the Cretaceous, did not, contrary to conventional wisdom, immediately clear the way for the rise of today’s mammals. This extinction is marked by a point known to geology as the KT boundary, a reddish quarter-inch strata of clay created by an impact from an asteroid that struck the planet with the force of 100 million megatons-that's equal to one Hiroshima-sized bomb for every person on the earth today.

Ah, Nation, the polar caps are melting but think of what means for us! More fish! More oil, Diamonds, Shipping Routes, drowning polar bears, and the chance to convert puffins to Christianity! Enjoy and forward on...Posted by Jason McManus.

NASA's orbiting Cassini spacecraft has photographed something unexplainable over the north pole of Saturn: a double hexagon formed in the clouds. No one knows what it is.

The two six-sided enigmas (one inside the other) are an unprecedented discovery. "We haven't seen a (geometric) feature like this anywhere else on any other planet," said Cassini scientist Kevin Baines of the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's unbelievable."

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts glimpsed one of the unexplained hexagons more than 20 years ago, but Cassini's infrared mapping instrument has provided the first whole, irrefutable images of the feature.

As part of a study to find a cure for colorblindness, scientists have successfully created a genetically modified mouse that can see like humans. Regular mice, like most other mammals, only register light in the blue and green regions of the spectrum, but the GM mice were able see red light as well – a trick that so far only monkeys, apes and people have mastered.

Men are at greater risk than women of being color blind because color vision genes are located on the X-chromosome. Since women have two X chromosomes, odds are good that at least one will carry the normal genes. This study provides hope that color-blindness in human is correctable.

As part of the study, scientists inserted a human gene into the genome responsible for generating a particular protein in the retina of the animal's eye that was sensitive to light at the red end of the visible spectrum. Unlike unmodified mice, the GM mice demonstrated that they were now able to learn how to sense red light - just like monkeys, apes and people.

Jeremy Nathans, of the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland, said that the study emulates the important evolutionary transition in early primate mammals from dichromatic (two color) vision to full trichromatic (three color) vision, which is estimated to have occurred 40 million years ago. Original post by Rebecca Sato.

Shangri-La is one of my favorite Mark Knopfler albums. Recorded in Malibu with a crew of loyal Knopfler sidemen, Shangri-La tells the stories of the acclaimed and the adrift, all delivered with the nonchalant idyllic grace that has marked Knopfler's music since Dire Straits emerged in the late '70s. I linked to the full-length Rhapsody tracks. Posted by Jason McManus.

The Japanese space telescope, Hinode, is revealing startling new facts about the Sun. NASA scienctists revealed this new information in a recent press conference held in Washington DC.

"Everything we thought we knew about X-ray images of the Sun is now out of date," says Leon Golub from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. "We've seen many new and unexpected things…”

Hinode (Japanese for "sunrise") was launched to study the solar magnetic field and how magnetic energy is released as the field rises into the Sun's outer atmosphere. It orbits the Earth in a permanent twilight zone between night and day, which gives it a continuous view of the Sun.

The Times of London reported that long-lost illustrations by Galileo of the Moon’s surface as he saw it through his telescope have come to light after four centuries. Galileo Galilei is often described as the father of modern astronomy and physics.

The five watercolours are in Galileo’s own copy of Sidereus Nuncius -The Starry Messenger- in which he gave details of his revolutionary “celestial discoveries”. In Sidereus Nuncius he used his telescopic observations of Jupiter’s moons to support his argument for a Sun-centered theory of the Solar System.

The work was crucial in overturning the belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth and provoked a show-down with the Vatican that ended in imprisonment for heresy. He was the first scientist to report lunar mountains and craters, concluding that the Moon was “rough and uneven, and just like the surface of the Earth itself,” rather than a smooth sphere as Aristotle had claimed.

Professor Horst Bredekamp head of the Art History Institute at Humboldt University in Berlin, who authenticated the drawings, said that Galileo had been in a hurry to circulate the work. “He was very worried that someone else might beat him to it”, he said. “We know of about 30 examples of the first edition of Sidereus Nuncius, but this one is by far the most precious and important.”

Google released a new mobile search engine yesterday designed to make it easier to find Web information using a handheld device. The new service can be accessed from a mobile browser and customized to feature preselected weather, news, stocks, and movies information, tailored to a specific geographic area. By using improved algorithms and factoring in a user's location, the new mobile search engine delivers a more relevant list of Web results than its previous version.